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Sunday, August 23, 2015

Some Unexpected Information from MyHeritage.com

I don't completely know what I expected to learn from MyHeritage.com's Record Match technology, but I suspect that some of the things I have learned were not planned or foreseen. In fact, some of them are pretty strange. Let me start with a bit of explanation. MyHeritage.com is one of the partner programs with FamilySearch.org. As part of that partnership, MyHeritage.com has a link, through its Record Matches, with the FamilySearch.org Family Tree.

The unexpected information results, in part, from the fact that I uploaded my entire pedigree to MyHeritage.com some years ago. The program has had a long time to find sources right from the time the Record Match technology was initiated. For this reason, your results may vary. Another contributing factor to the unexpected results is the fairly recent inclusion of the Family Tree data.

Here is what happens.

MyHeritage.com shows that I have 14,420 Record Matches. When I view that huge number of matches by "Person," I can see that one of my ancestors, Nathaniel Potter, has 247 matches. When I look at the list of matches, I see something rather strange and unexpected. There are a huge number of "Nathaniel Potters" listed as coming from the Family Tree. Guess what? MyHeritage.com has found all the duplicate Nathaniel Potters with unique Personal Identification Numbers. If I click on each of the multiple Nathaniel Potters, I find each of them are duplicates in the Family Tree, each with their own PID.

In short, if MyHeritage.com finds multiple copies of a person in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree, then they are very likely to be duplicates. By the way, FamilySearch does not find, nor can it merge all these duplicates until the transition from new.FamilySearch.org is completed. The multiple copies also indicate duplicates in WikiTree.com and Geni.com.

For Nathaniel Potter, when I look at one of the duplicate Family Tree records, I get 246 additional Record Detective matches. Nearly all of these are in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. MyHeritage.com is showing me, graphically, I might add, each of the real duplicates of my ancestors in the Family Tree; theoretically, I could count the exact number and track down each of the PIDs but FamilySearch can't do anything about it right now.